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Comment by blakeweb | Hacker News Reader

Bias: I'm a co-founder of BuildASign.com, an ecommerce company in Austin, and we're hiring. (Extra bias: we're a great company to work for, if Austin interests you.)

I agree that this article blows the issue out of proportion, but then again, any intelligent internet company realizes that its future success and future value is determined, more than anything else, by the quality of its software people. That being the case, any company where the higher-ups don't think finding the best software folks is the #1 problem (or at least one of the critical issues) at the moment is probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. I think this is the #1 problem we face as a company, and yet I agree this article blows the "problem" out of proportion in the way the article presents the issue.

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No offense meant, but "our pace is often fast and furious. We put in extra hours to output excellent results" in your careers page is working against you here :)

To each of his own.

It's very very tough to find the "best software folks" and hope this cog (yes, sorry bro) can join your company and fit the culture.

I joined a company with decent software developers (that are willing to listen, learn, and also live life like a normal regular human being) and I couldn't be more happier.

During my interview, the manager, the senior people, and the owner keeps stressing 2 things: we hire people that fit our culture and we don't hire stupid people (not the smartest). I asked everybody who interviewed me of how long they have been here and the minimum question was 3 years (the person is one of the Directors). The rest have been there for 6 years, 8 years, etc.

We struggled together. We went through hard times together. At the end of the day, these people go home everyday to their family and go back to work tomorrow without extra baggages.

The best software folks tend to have their own dogmatic approaches that may clash with everybody else that he thinks less superior (U KNO NO EMACS? Ur LVL just went down a few notch and U SHALL BOW TO ME!).

I mean... c'mon, let's get real here and clear those pixie dusts. If the smartest people don't have that kind of ego, they ain't smart to begin with.

I completely disagree with your last statement, and believe that that kind of thinking is bad.

It allows assholes to continue to pose as 'smart people' because they simply bully their peers, and their superiors will assume they must be smart because their peers defer to them.

There is absolutely no reason why truly smart people would be assholes.

Sure, I am throwing a blanketed statements. That's why I opened my comment as "it is very very hard to find...".

Assholes will be assholes regardless whether they're smart or not. If their superiors like assholes, then that's the culture in there. It's up to you whether you want to work there or not.

Smart people that aren't assholes are hard to find. Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, Zed Shaw, DHH, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, should I go on with the list?

I'm not suggesting that smart people should be asshole. Or people should pretend to be asshole. But based on my tiny speck of observation, experienced, interviews, reading the tone of blog posts, smart people tend to be assholes.

Word on the street is that you guys have a core group of developers that are set in their (old and busted) ways.

I think that's likely to be the perception any time you have a company that's grown quickly and organically, at least when your whole company depends on your software as much as ours does. Ditching something that's interwoven into every business process is tough, and making new approaches play well with existing ones is tricky. We're all for doing things the best way.

If you have specific ideas, I'd love to hear them, and would gladly buy you lunch. Shoot me an email.

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